In the context of the transition from Anthro to GenArch, I have felt compelled for days to open a thread around the proto-Germanic question. On the other hand, I don't have the courage (nor the time) to transport here all the work done over there over many months, and moreover, it would be necessary to purify this work of logical dross, inaccuracies, and other adventurous shortcuts, all by-products of polemics. I will therefore limit myself to the essentials, taking as a "leverage point" the summary made by Valter Lang of the work carried out in his 2015 text: "Formation of Proto-Finnic – an archaeological scenario from the Bronze Age / Early Iron Age". The word "archaeological" must immediately attract your attention. Lang is not a linguist, although he takes the work of the Estonian and Finnish schools of linguistics very seriously. I will therefore have, and this is essentially what the first part of my job will consist of, to develop and source the linguistic aspects of his thesis. Because the logic of my remarks here will in fact be the opposite of Lang's: first linguistic, it will allude to archaeological and genetic dimensions only for the sake of convergence.
1. A common horizon for both Pre-Proto-Saami and Pre-Proto-Finnic (if it indeed existed) can only be found in the Volga–Oka region in the Bronze Age;
2. From there two branches of cultural influences spread westwards, one through the North-Western and another through the South-Western Passage of Contacts. The former can be connected with Pre-Proto-Saami and the latter with Pre-Proto-Finnic.
3. Both movements took place in several waves lasting over many centuries. The first Pre-Proto-Saami movements perhaps started already within the Textile Ware networks, but they certainly continued in the later Bronze Age / Early Iron Age (Anan’ino influences). The Pre-Proto-Finnic speakers started to shift westwards at the end of the second millennium BC.
4. After a few centuries, these two branches of western Finno-Ugrians met again somewhere in Finland; they spoke similar languages, but those who came from the South-Western Passage had already obtained a rather strong Proto-Baltic ‘accent’.
5. On the shores of the Baltic, the Pre-Proto-Finnic newcomers met a mixed population speaking (several?) aboriginal and Proto-Germanic languages,the latter being in the dominant position.
6. In the following processes the biggest role was played by new waves of immigrants from the east; a particularly important wave was the one that brought along fortified settlements, bronze axes of the Akozino-Mälar type and early tarand-graves in the 9th–8th centuries BC. This wave also reached the western shores of the Baltic establishing in this way an axis of contacts between the bronze work centres in the Volga–Kama region and Scandinavia.
7. As a result of these processes and language contacts with Proto-Baltic,Proto-Germanic, and some Palaeo-European, Proto-Finnic emerged and it also achieved the dominant position at least in what are today coastal Estonia, SW Finland, and the Daugava valley in Latvia. <However, as more intensive and developing processes concentrated next on the coastal areas further north, it is easy to imagine the mechanisms of the separation of one portion of Proto-Finnic-population – the one that was later called South Estonian.>
("Formation of Proto-Finnic – an archaeological scenario from the Bronze Age / Early Iron Age", Valter Lang 2015)
The subject of the present thread makes its first appearance in this text in 5. It will be necessary to bring some nuances and additions to it, in particular by examining what happened "on the other side", that is with pre-proto-Saami (what happened and when it happened). Let us not forget that Lang's concern here is Estonia, not Finland, nor proto-Germanic. What emerges here is this, which Lang seems to take for granted: when speakers of pre-proto-Finnic began to settle in the regions that correspond to present-day Estonia, southwestern Finland, and the Mälaren region in Sweden, they met there, among others, a population which spoke, Lang tells us, proto-Germanic. It is particularly assured for him that the people who in these regions buried their most precious representatives in monumental stone-cist graves and stone ships, were speakers of proto-Germanic. In another text, Lang writes:
The distribution of the cultural tradition emanating from the west, i.e. Scandinavia and Northern Central Europe in contemporary Estonia, Finland and Latvia began already during the Neolithic and continued during the Early Bronze Age and is archaeologically identifiable with ever increasing imported goods (flint daggers, bronze axes, etc.). Permanent monuments of a western origin began to be built in the countries of the east coast of the Baltic sea, however, from the Middle Bronze Age. In Finland, these were usually monumental stone graves or burial cairns (Finnish: hiidenkiuas) located atop higher hilltops, whereas in Estonia, somewhat smaller stone-cist graves and early Celtic fields were spread. On the lower course of River Daugava in Latvia, Reznes-type barrows and in Northern Latvia stone-cist graves similar to those found in Estonia are known. In addition, stone ships of Gotland origin are known on the east coast of the Baltic sea and the islands, and also cup stones especially from Estonia, less from Finland and the least from Latvia.
The appearance of such permanent monuments likely indicates the arrival of new groups of peoples from the south and west coasts of the Baltic sea. Taking into account historical linguistic comparisons, the newcomers must have been pre-Germanic peoples speaking pre-Proto-Germanic.
On the other hand,later, there is every reason to identify the builders of the Tarand Graves with the Proto-Finnic immigrants of the southwestern route.The intersection of the distributions of these modes of burial, to which we could add the distribution of the Akozino-Mälar axes, would give us an idea precise enough of the area where pre-/proto-Germanic and proto-Finnic cultures met, and perhaps hybridized.
That said, what are these "historical linguistic comparisons" on which Lang relies to identify those autochthonous people ("autochthonous" when proto-Finnic arrive in the zone) with Germanic-speaking people?
2. Interrelatedness Proto-Germanic - proto-Finnic (1)
"In conclusion, we point to the interrelatedness of location and dating of Proto-Germanic and Proto-Finnic. There are few reconstructed protolanguages in Europe with such intensive contacts, and the palaeolinguistic evidence suggesting nearly identical cultural characteristics of their prehistoric communities. Thus, the location and dating of these two protolanguages is largely dependent on each other." (Saarikivi and Holopainen 2017)
The signs that point to those "intensive contacts" are firstly (but perhaps not only) lexical.
Indeed, and here is the crucial point of the whole problem, the Balto-Finnic languages and Finnish itself before any other, borrowed from Proto-Germanic an enormous mass of words. (I say "proto-Germanic" for short. The oldest ones are indeed difficult to date with certainty and could have been borrowed from a late pre-proto-Germanic. In any case, these are indeed words prior to the proto-Scandinavian). This lexical mass is currently estimable at more than 500 terms, but it is constantly growing. It was estimated that it represents for the Finnish language a lexicon comparable to the Franco-Norman superstrate of the English language. The reference, indispensable although already quite old, is the huge three-volume dictionary that specialists and amateurs affectionately call "The" Läglös: "Lexikon der älteren germanischen Lehnwörter in den ostseefinnischen Sprachen" (Kylstra et al. 1991). For those who don't have the courage to delve into it, Wikipedia offers 581 pages (but some are devoted to Proto-Scandinavian borrowings): en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Finnish_terms_derived_from_Proto-Germanic
It is important, before continuing a little on this theme, to insist on this: there is nothing speculative here. The proto-Germanic lexicon of Finnish is an element of an absolutely factual nature.
It goes without saying that such a massive loan could not have resulted from occasional contacts, such as those resulting from simple commercial relations. But, beyond the simple quantitative observation, the semantic ubiquity of this proto-Germanic lexicon makes such a hypothesis untenable. It is particularly symptomatic that it contains most of the vocabulary relating to advanced techniques of agriculture (unlike primitive techniques where proto-Baltic borrowings dominate) and animal husbandry. To take just a few examples:
multa:soil,
aidun:pasture, field
niittää:to cut hay
lammas:sheep
aura:plow
lauma:herd
humala:hop
nauta:bovine
mallas:malt
kana:chicken
ruis:rye
juusto:cheese
kaura:oats
rasva:grease
laiho:growing grain
akanat:chaff
kello:(cow) bell
turve:peat
pelto:field
vainio:largish field
lanta:manure
tunkio:dunghill
It is also remarkable that the word "äiti" (mother) is a Proto-Germanic borrowing (while "tyttö" = daughter and "sissar" = sister are probably Proto-Baltic). Remarkable as well that the word "häpy" (shame, and by derivation human female genitalia) is one too. I could go on like this for pages, which I might do later because walking around the Läglös has become one of my favourite hobbies.
We cannot recoil from the only plausible explanation: the existence of communities where bilingualism was the rule. Why at a certain time did proto-Finnic take precedence by assimilating a whole borrowed lexicon? This question, certainly fascinating, is beyond the scope of this work.
3. Saami
The Saami languages have their share of proto-Germanic lexical borrowings. Even if this share is considerably less important than that of Proto-Finnic, it is nonetheless rich in lessons (and questions). In his 2006 text ("On Germanic-Saami contacts and Saami prehistory") Ante Aikio notes:
Jorma Koivulehto has demonstrated in his studies that there are two distinct strata of Germanic loanwords in Saami which precede the extensive stratum of Proto-Scandinavian loans, the existence of which has already for long been recognised. Even these older borrowings seem to have been adopted largely independent of Finnic, as most of them do not have Finnic cognates.
In detail the study of the problem of Germanic loanwords in Saami is difficult, and I'll refer to the texts of Aikio. It is, however, safe to say that the pre-proto-Saami speakers, who had travelled by the North-Western route, first settled throughout southern Finland where they encountered the native Germanic speakers. The time of this meeting cannot be very different from that when the common "German-Finnic" history began. But they may not coincide. One can in particular think that the first Germano-Saami meetings occurred before the pre-proto-Finnic speakers established, coming from Estonia, their first Finnish colonies. This is what Aikio suggests:
One thus arrives at the picture that Proto-Saami originally developed in an area situated between the known Germanic and Finnic language groups and the unknown Palaeo-European cultures of Northern Europe (see Map 1).
